“... himself personally warm and privately tolerant. Nonetheless, the story of ‘the two majors’ may be worth telling. They were a couple of odd characters who crossed Cripps’s path when he went to Delhi in 1946, to seek a settlement in India on behalf of the British Cabinet. Most of his links were with the Hindu-dominated Congress, so he tried to ...”

“... commercial and managerial resources required to build and fight a seagoing fleet’. This may be putting the cart before the horse or, to unmix metaphors, the land before the sea. Because of the sheer scale and variety of skills, commodities and manpower they required in order to function, 17th and 18th-century fighting navies – and not just ...”

“... story: strong, inventive and dynamic. If you enlarge the frame to include South Asia, the picture may be less rosy but it is still largely positive. The African experience, of course, is far more mixed, as is the Arab world, but there is no reason to believe that imperial adventures are going to put that right. Indeed, some of the greatest difficulties these ...”

“... World War acquired a bad reputation, but not everything that was said was a lie. German soldiers may not have bayonetted babies in Belgium as the popular press had it, but they did commit atrocities. According to recent studies, German soldiers shot civilians in occupied Belgium and France, they raped women, and they deliberately destroyed cultural landmarks ...”

“... wrote it. But do they actually do this? I suggest that they skip what is not worth reading, and it may be that they have cultivated the art of skipping to their profit; but most people haven’t: it is surely better that they should have their skipping done for them by someone of taste and discrimination. Here’s a paragraph Maugham struck from the first ...”

“... Koven hopes that his revelation of the persistent entanglement of the erotic and the altruistic ‘may perhaps inspire and chasten those intent to better the world to reflect deeply on the implications of the choices made by like-minded men and women a century ago’, and no doubt that hope is sincere. But it is worth asking whether the approach deployed here ...”

“... we belong to the same family, that we speak the same language, that we understand one another. I may like a bourgeois better, but he is a stranger.’ As a child he had been educated largely by an aged clerical tutor, the beloved Abbé le Sueur, and, though he encountered the children of the bourgeoisie at a lycée in Metz when he was 16, he spent less than ...”

“... keep his private life, if he has one, secret. But he has also done something that, for a writer, may be even more remarkable: created a career impervious to narrative. His first novels, V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1967), were cult books that went on to become contemporary classics, and his extraordinary reputation, at least among nerds and ...”

“... bloody fool alive’. Surprisingly, Faber never considers the possibility that, while Amery may not have thought of himself as Jewish, he was almost certainly the object of anti-semitism. He quotes a long tirade against him by Wickham Steed, later editor of the Times – for whom Amery was an untrustworthy little Jew without ‘a drop of English blood ...”

“... the Kinnocks, the Blairs. In this pantheon the touchingly loyal team of Michael and Jill may confidently be placed.’ ‘Michael and Jill’: how cosy. It seems unfair to bracket Glenys Kinnock, say, with Beatrice Webb and Margaret Cole, both of whom were serious intellectuals, and I can’t get used to the idea of a pantheon that includes Cherie ...”

“... Even the much praised roof was in a sense wrong-headed – a brilliant design executed in what may have been the wrong material. In reminiscences of the early 1930s, Arup describes meeting ‘a number of young people who really were interested in new ideas’, who ‘were in love with an architectural style, with the aesthetic feel of the kind of building ...”

“... on the desert air,’ Gray wrote, suggesting also that ‘Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest’ – ‘here’ being the country churchyard of the poem’s title. The idea is tempting, semi-consoling and ultimately incoherent. If this corpse, in life, was mute and inglorious he just wasn’t Milton. This is precisely Harrison’s ...”

“... and supernumerary cockerels, they feed a family and its visitors from November until the end of May. Or will do, if permitted. Pigs embody, in particularly vivid fashion, the lost amenities of an unimproved world. If, as we are promised, the foot and mouth epidemic gains in virulence with the cold weather, then the game will be up for the hobby farmer as ...”

“... imperative and despise any attempt to resist it – hence his nationalistic positions, whatever he may say when he’s abroad, and his admiration for generals. When Oz lets the story loose (lets the ‘bimbo’ have her way, lets the world fall apart) he gets lost and falls back on romantic self-deprecation, becoming the famous hermit-figure in the Negev who ...”

“... life-in-its-time is of more interest than her work. These days biography sells, and we may be moving to a point where fiction is seen to be no more than a useful biographical resource. Blackwood’s Lady-Carolineness, her unhappy childhood, busy sex life, connections to major figures in art and literature, and gaudy drinking does make her a ...”